Not just where she was touching. Everywhere. A current that started at the point of contact and shot up my arm and into my chest and kept going, into my skull, and for a moment—a real, measurable moment—every thought I had went blank. Rachel. The wall. The reflex. Three years of scar tissue. All of it wiped clean by five fingers on my forearm.
She didn't let go.
She held on as the bullfighters worked the bull across the ring. Held on as the kid rolled to his knees, shook his head, found his hat. Held on as the crowd noise shifted from alarm to relief, the collective exhale of people who'd just watched something almost go terribly wrong and were grateful it hadn't.
The rider stood. Dusted himself off. Gave the crowd a sheepish tip of his hat—the code, the same code the first cowboy had followed earlier, the one that said you eat the dirt and smile about it and walk it off. The crowd cheered. The bull, corralled now, trotted through the exit gate with the satisfied energy of an animal who'd done exactly what he'd set out to do.
Lou let go of my arm.
Slowly. Her fingers loosening one at a time, like she was emerging from something rather than simply releasing a grip.She exhaled—long, unsteady, the exhale of a woman who'd just been somewhere intense and was finding her way back.
"It's so much more personal up close," she said. Her voice was different—quieter, slightly raw, the voice of someone who'd been holding her breath and had only just remembered to stop.
"It's even more personal when you're the rider," I said.
She turned. Looked up at me—because she had to look up, the height difference significant at this proximity, her face tilted, her eyes searching mine with that directness that I was beginning to understand wasn't a choice but a condition. She simply couldn't look at something without looking all the way into it.
"Is that how you got the buckle?" she asked.
My hand went to it without thinking. The Pendleton silver, heavy at my waist, warm from my body heat. I looked down at it—the engraving, the date, the name of the event I'd carried with me like a talisman.
"Pendleton Round-Up," I said. "I was nineteen. Drew a bull named Sermon—bad reputation, good animal. He'd put four riders in the dirt before they hit five seconds. Nobody wanted the draw."
"But you did."
"I was too young to know better." I ran my thumb across the engraving. "Eight seconds. Longest eight seconds of my life. But I stayed on, and when the buzzer hit, the crowd—" I paused, the memory so vivid it carried its own soundtrack. "I'd never heard anything like it. That sound. It's not cheering, exactly. It's something older. Something that comes from the gut of a crowd that just watched you do something they thought was impossible."
"Your parents must have been proud," Lou said.
The words cut. Not deep—more like a paper cut, the kind that stings out of proportion to the wound. I felt the smile on myface thin, shift, become something that held its shape but lost its warmth.
"My mother was proud," I said. "She cried. Happy tears. Told everyone in our town for months." I paused. Looked at the arena, at the dirt, at the empty chute where the next bull would be loaded. "My dad—he wasn't around for it."
The silence between us was different now. Heavier. The crowd noise still pressed in from all sides, but inside the space between us, the air had changed.
"I just lost my dad," Lou said.
She said it fast. Like the words had been sitting behind her teeth and had pushed their way out before she could stop them. Her eyes widened slightly after she said it—the look of a woman who'd surprised herself, who'd offered something she hadn't planned to offer and was now standing in the aftermath of her own honesty.
"Not two weeks ago," she added, quieter.
I looked at her. At the bourbon-brown eyes that had gone bright in a way that had nothing to do with the arena lights.
"I'm sorry," I said. And meant it—fully, simply, in the way you could only mean it when you understood what that absence felt like from the inside.
She shrugged. Not dismissively—the way people shrug when the feeling is too big for the gesture and the gesture is all they've got.
"Do you ever miss him?" she asked. "Your dad?"
I should have deflected. Should have said something vague and appropriate, the kind of thing you say to a stranger at an event when the conversation has accidentally gotten too real. I was good at that. I'd been trained in it—the art of proximity without exposure, of being present without being known.
"I miss both of them," I said. "Every day."
The words came out and I heard them and realized it was the first time I'd said that out loud. To anyone. Not to my brothers. Not to Briggs. Not to the chaplain who'd offered to talk after Stuttgart. Not to the empty apartment where I paced and pretended I was fine.
I'd said it to a stranger at a rodeo, and it was the truest thing I'd told anyone in years.
"I can't believe I'm blabbering like this," I said, the words rough, pulling back the way you pull back from a flame you've stood too close to. "Your friend up in the box is probably better company than?—"
